


Dark Water

by Anythingtoasted



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 8x17 coda, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-08
Updated: 2013-03-08
Packaged: 2017-12-04 16:31:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/712764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anythingtoasted/pseuds/Anythingtoasted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was strange, and quiet, the man Daphne married.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dark Water

**Author's Note:**

> I've been wanting to explore what, potentially, possessed Daphne to take a naked man into her home, and this is something that came to me in the middle of the night, so forgive its strangeness! I just wanted to explore what their life together might have been like, perhaps.

He was strange and quiet, the man Daphne married; the healer who walked out of the lake.

At a loss for other options – confused by his strange, gentle smiles – they decided Baptism was the best course of action.

Affably, he let them strip him naked and lead him to the pool. The father took his hand and onlookers – old and young alike, none of which knew his name (or if he even had one) - watched as he waded, his limp sex curled between his legs, slim body trailing lines behind him through the water.

They pushed him under – four of them, though he needed no forcing – and he blinked back up at them from underneath as they blessed him. The lights above the pool shimmered and swirled on the surface of the water, above his eyes, and through that blue sheen his hair waved, floating, like a halo around his pale forehead.

They dried him, warmed him, clothed him again. He was no less quiet, after; ate no more, nor drank, except when prompted. He remained, quiet and kind.

But at least he was Saved now, they told Daphne, who frowned with arms folded throughout the entire affair, watching the pool as her husband was Blessed. At least, now, he would  _definitely_  get to visit heaven.

She kept a hand on his arm, steering, throughout sundays at church. She led him through social graces and affairs, and when she named him – _Emmanuel_  – they didn’t question it. Daphne was his constant aide, the caring hand at his back, and she rarely let him out of her sight.

 _She_  lived quietly, too; they wondered if this was why she’d been the one to find him. Why she was the one to have the Dreams, telling her where he was, telling her other things she would not discuss. They were all – the whole town – surprised when she married a man, given her history.

A step in the right direction, they decided; though their marriage was strange, to say the least, and carried out in secrecy, much like most of their strange, private life together.

Daphne grew used to him, eventually. He was almost silent; trod carefully around the varnished floors of her house, and lay mute in bed when asked, though she knew he did not sleep. She knew he was good because the Dreams had told her so – but she thinks she might have worked it out on her own, anyhow, watching him as he healed. She asked him about it once, after watching him tenderly cradle the neck and rump of a child – his large, sure hands, their wide, flat nails.

“Were you a father, do you think?”

He raised his head from where he’d been bent, eyes closed, his nose touching the baby’s. “No.” he said, simply, and looked her in the eyes.

She didn’t ask again.

He had his habits, strange; he was prone to long walks, and threw himself so absolutely and completely into his job as a healer that sometimes she worried for him, sweet and naïve as he seemed. He would see twenty, thirty patients a day, and tackle anything from terminal cancer to athlete’s foot, treating each with the same gravity, the same importance. All were healed beneath his hands. Some people in the town thought he was the Second Coming – but Daphne, eventually, knew better.

She would often find him downstairs in the middle of the night, the kitchen warm – on the counters, in bowls and in dishes, hundreds and hundreds of loaves of bread surrounded him. He didn’t eat them – only kneaded, for hours and hours, the soft, fleshy piles of dough he made in copious amounts. His healing paid for the supplies a hundred times over – for yeast, for flour and butter – but she found it unnerving. She had dreams where the dough sprouted out of him, large, amorphous lumps transmuting themselves out of his skin and dropping to the ground in droves, slapping wetly on her kitchen tiles, as he stood there, impassively, and watched.

“Were you a baker?” she asked him, leaning in the doorway, one baking Saturday. “Did you make things?”

He turned to face her, his hands pushing still at the dough – forward with the heel of his hand, back with the other, a rhythm as hypnotic to her as it was strange. “Maybe once.” He said. “Perhaps.”

She dressed him in her brother’s clothes. She hid her old photos, for fear of what he might think. She wondered, vaguely, if he loved her; if he even knew what that  _meant._

A large black car circled their block, day in, day out. Daphne, try as she might, never saw the driver’s face.

He woke screaming and she ran to him, across the hall. He looked at her, eyes wide, and said, “Sometimes I think that I’m God.”

Too shocked to even reply, she closed her mouth tightly. She shook her head, and walked away – went downstairs and then went outside, barefoot, into the garden, where wet grass, thick with dew, smelling sweet as lust, clung to her soles; tripped her.

He asked one day if she would like him to touch her – and she eyed his clumsy hands with hesitation. She took his face in her hands. She told him, no.

She said, “Do you love me, Emmanuel?”

“Love,” he replied, voice hard-edged, “is irrelevant.”

Eventually, after six months together, she begged him. She beat her fists against his chest.

She took one of his lumps of dough – and in her hands it deflated, clung to her fingers, slipped between them – and threw it at him, missed by a mile. It landed on the ground, just like the dream, and she screamed, “Fight me! Fight me, Emmanuel, fucking fight me! _”_ For reasons she could barely explain, herself.

His floury hands gathered in fists at his sides. He stalked across the room towards her  and she backed away – the fury in his eyes was like the fury in her dreams, like the Voice that had spoken to her before he came to be with her, loud and terrifying and old - something else, something  _large._ He stood over her short frame. He said, with acid in his tone, firmly, “No.” then his volume dropped. “No.” he repeated, and shrunk back. He went to the sink to wash his hands. He said nothing more.

After that she avoided him – did what she had to to keep him safe but feared him, made excuses not to be in rooms with him. Hated her silent house, the voices that still talked to her at night.

She rose from her bed one morning when he was still ‘asleep’ – tiptoed into his blank, featureless room and stood unsurprised in the doorway to find wings rising from his back, horrible and black and oil-slick shiny. They covered the ceiling like leaden hands, dropping feathers all over; they curled like a cocoon around the strange man she saved.

She wanted to rip them from his bones. She wanted to fight him, wanted to scream at him, wanted to  _die._

But instead she went to him;  ducked under one large, feathered limb and kissed his forehead, and said, “ _I know what you are, Emmanuel_.”

Like a curse. 


End file.
